Hasta La Creative!

All loaded and ripe with irony, this 1967 Mattel print ad unabashedly pitched a toy assault weapon to your average preteen boy, a kid who had likely grown up playing with toy guns (and holsters) as an outgrowth of watching shoot-’em-up TV shows like “Gunsmoke.”

But by the mid-’60s, Westerns had fallen out of favor as the Vietnam War escalated. Barbie-maker Mattel was branching out from the doll’s similarly sophisticated plastics engineering to mass-produce “authentic-looking” toy weapons, and decided to create facsimiles of the M-16 gun that troops were using out in the jungle.

The real weapon was originally designed by Eugene Stoner of Armalite as the AR-15, a variation of which, police say, Nikolas Cruz used to murder 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

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